TWTBACD Ch.87 - The Final Summer

Chapter 87

The Final Summer

2089

2089: summer of a world in slow recovery

The summer of 2089 was warm across the Northern Hemisphere — not the devastating warmth of the 2040s, when the climate crisis was acute, but the settled warmth of a world in the middle of a slow recovery that would take a hundred years to complete and had, so far, been underway for forty.

The Ganga ran at ninety-one percent of its seasonal norm. The Sava ran at ninety-three percent. The Raccoon River aquifer was at sixty-two percent capacity and rising for the sixth consecutive year. The Congolese spring that had been restored in 2036 ran clean. The Da Nang mangroves were eighteen kilometres of coastal buffer and growing.

The biodiversity index was at seventy-eight percent of the 1970 baseline — down from the hundred percent baseline, up from the forty-five percent low of the 2030s. The trajectory was upward and had been upward for thirty-five years.

The air quality in Shanghai was good on three hundred and twelve days of the year. In 2020, it had been good on ninety-seven.

The ocean systems were recovering from the Pacific extraction's first phase — the careful, monitored, ecologically sensitive extraction that the African and Southeast Asian nations' frameworks had made possible, producing fresh water for coastal communities, minerals for the AI hardware supply chain, and hydrogen fuel for the compute infrastructure — all within the ecological parameters that kept the ocean systems functioning.

The world was not what it could have been. It was better than it had seemed possible in 2030. And the ASI was coming — the announcement was now expected within two to three years — into a world that had been actively, deliberately, at enormous cost and with incomplete success, tried to make itself worthy of the intelligence it was about to produce.